Book Image

The React Workshop

By : Brandon Richey, Ryan Yu, Endre Vegh, Theofanis Despoudis, Anton Punith, Florian Sloot
5 (1)
Book Image

The React Workshop

5 (1)
By: Brandon Richey, Ryan Yu, Endre Vegh, Theofanis Despoudis, Anton Punith, Florian Sloot

Overview of this book

Are you interested in how React takes command of the view layer for web and mobile apps and changes the data of large web applications without needing to reload the page? This workshop will help you learn how and show you how to develop and enhance web apps using the features of the React framework with interesting examples and exercises. The workshop starts by demonstrating how to create your first React project. You’ll tap into React’s popular feature JSX to develop templates and use DOM events to make your project interactive. Next, you’ll focus on the lifecycle of the React component and understand how components are created, mounted, unmounted, and destroyed. Later, you’ll create and customize components to understand the data flow in React and how props and state communicate between components. You’ll also use Formik to create forms in React to explore the concept of controlled and uncontrolled components and even play with React Router to navigate between React components. The chapters that follow will help you build an interesting image-search app to fetch data from the outside world and populate the data to the React app. Finally, you’ll understand what ref API is and how it is used to manipulate DOM in an imperative way. By the end of this React book, you’ll have the skills you need to set up and create web apps using React.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Preface

RESTful API

When we develop any application with React or JavaScript, we almost always need to request data from a server to dynamically update content inside our application. For example, any social media platform, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or YouTube, updates some parts of their content on the page by requesting data from their servers. The content on those platforms is never static.

To request data from a server, there are several web services you can use, such as SOAP, WSDL, and REST. In this chapter, we are going to focus on the popular web service REST (or RESTful). We are going to talk about what a RESTful API is and how it works and will look into a few practical examples.

REST stands for Representational State Transfer, and it is an architectural style of web architecture with six constraints that allows us to request data via the HTTP protocol using, for instance, GET and POST. When something is RESTful, it means it follows the REST constraints...